


Blade In the Dark

by Churbooseanon



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-19
Updated: 2014-07-19
Packaged: 2018-02-09 14:04:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1985706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Churbooseanon/pseuds/Churbooseanon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Good killers aren't born. They are made.</p><p>And you have to start early.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blade In the Dark

They don’t give him much. A half loaf of bread. A half full canteen of stale water. A torn, too light coat that covers his shoulders and half his back and doesn’t button up right and has one sleeve missing. None of it is good. None of it is new. None of it is enough.

They give him other things. A small bag with a flint and tinder. He doesn’t know how to use them. They give him a knife like he sees on the uniforms of the guards, with the one side that looks like teeth.

They give him a puppy. Small and brown with a big black spot over its eye and on its tail and it licks his face and barks and plays and loves him with no restraint like any puppy does. He names it Fluffles.

They throw him in a dark room with his bread and water and coat and knife and flint and tinder and Fluffles. Throw him in a dark room and tell him that if he makes it a week they’ll let him out and they’ll give him a better coat. Give him shoes. Give him a big meal with things like soup and butter and if he’s really good, they’ll give him ice cream.

He’s pretty sure that was two weeks ago. Can’t be sure with how dark it is. He tries to keep track with his sleeping, but he sleeps so light and they bang on the door sometimes to wake him up. Tries to keep time by the growling in his belly that he lets himself get to before taking another mouthful of bread. Only takes sips of water when he wakes up.

He finds the straw in the corner on the first day. Uses it to sleep. He’s cold, so cold, but Fluffles presses up against him, warm and happy and loving. They stay like that for a few times before he’s playing with the flint and tinder and makes a spark and it makes sense. Rips more off his sleeve, gathers a bit of straw. Wraps one side in cloth, lights the other, and grabs his tiny wick of light up to quickly look around the room. Takes doing it about twenty times to figure out his small room. Ten paces wall to wall, straw in one corner. Hole in the center of the roof that no light comes down through. wonders what it’s for until he sees the smoke from his final light blow up it.

Lives another night in the dark. Fluffles whimpers when he takes his bite of food, but doesn’t go for it, doesn’t bite. Just whimpers because he’s lying weakly in the corner like he has been for a while now.

He slowly moves all the straw to the center of the room over three sleeping and waking cycles. Moves it under the hole he remembers being there. It makes him hungry to work so hard, but he does it because he has to. Has to have something to keep him going for a week.

Fluffles bites him trying to get at bread on what feels like the third week and is only the fourth day. He tears another piece off his shirt and ties it over the pain and the straw is all moved and he takes the knife up. He’d dropped the bread, and the puppy had gobbled it all up.

When they open the door at the end of what he’s later told is two weeks, he blinks up at the man standing there, beckoning him out. He leaves behind the coat. Leave behind the empty canteen. Leaves behind the bones he had gnawed clean in his desperate need for good. Leaves the knife protruding from the man’s chest.

He’d liked Fluffles.

The other man, the one smart enough to stand back from the door, smiles down at him, approval in his eyes.

The second man gives him a warm coat. Gives him water. Gives him soup. Over the next few weeks he gives him better food, better drinks, gives him ice cream and a new puppy that he doesn’t name and doesn’t like.

Gives him a name.

Gives him a goal.

Gives him training.

Gives him a smile on his face and song on his lips and murder in his heart and hands.

Flowers calls him Fluffles, in the back corner of his mind. Because someday, just like the dog, he’ll have to be put down. Because the man told him that you don’t leave weaknesses behind.

And the boy in that dark room is a weakness Flowers never wants to remember.


End file.
